Alan Lopez, MS, PhD

Board Member

Alan Lopez is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and the Rowden-White Chair of Global Health and Burden of Disease Measurement at the University of Melbourne. He is also Director of the Global Burden of Disease Group in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. He is an Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington.

He held prior appointments as Professor of Medical Statistics and Population Health, Professor of Global Health, and Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland from 2003 to 2012. Prior to joining the University, he worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland for 22 years where he held a series of technical and senior managerial posts including Chief Epidemiologist in WHO’s Tobacco Control Program, Manager of WHO’s Program on Substance Abuse, Director of the Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit, and Senior Science Advisor to the Director-General.

Professor Lopez is a highly cited author whose publications have received worldwide acclaim for their importance and influence in health and medical research. He is the co-author with Christopher Murray of the seminal Global Burden of Disease Study (1996), which has greatly influenced debates about priority setting and resource allocation in health. He is the co-author with Sir Richard Peto of the Peto-Lopez method, which is widely used to estimate tobacco-attributable mortality to support policy action.

In June of 2016, Dr. Lopez was appointed Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) in the Queen’s Birthday Honors List for his remarkable contributions to health science and the advancement of public health in developing countries.

Professor Lopez is on the editorial board of PLoS Medicine, BMC Medicine, The International Journal of Epidemiology, and Preventive Medicine and is co-Editor in Chief of Population Health Metrics. He was elected as a Foreign Associate Member of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences in 2009. He has previously served as a member of the Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Funding Committee (2007-2010), the WHO Expert Committee on NCD Surveillance (2009-2011), the US National Academy of Sciences Panel on Divergent Trends in Longevity (2008-2011), the Scientific Board of the Oxford Health Alliance Grand Challenges in Non-Communicable Disease (2006-2009), was former Chair of the Health and Medical Research Council of Queensland (2006-2008), and was Chair of the Executive Board of the Health Metrics Network (2012-2013). He has been awarded several major research grants in epidemiology, health services research, and population health.

He received a BSc with honors from the University of Western Australia, an MS from Purdue University in Lafayette, IN, and his PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra.